Is meditation only practised by tree-hugging-hippies? A data analyst's view on mindful exercises.
Are meditation practitioners mostly greenies and tree-huggers? Is there scientific proof on benefits of meditation? Do we see any trends? And other Monday morning thoughts f.e. the happiness equation.
The standard visualization when we think of somebody meditating is a person sitting in a child pose with his arms resting on the legs while creating circles with his index fingers and thumbs. Mostly this person is wearing red monk robes and starts to float in the air after some seconds.
So sorry to tell you I’m not going to teach you how to float!
🤓 A data analyst's view on meditation.
Meditation has the reputation of being a practice for three-huggers, yoghurt-knitters, and lentil-weavers. I decided to do what I do best: analyze the data.1
👨👩👧 Who are the meditation practitioners
All over the world, between 200 and 500 million people meditate. That’s around 6% of the world's population. Compared to the globe, this would be more or less the total population of the European Union.
People between 45 and 64 years old tend to meditate the most, but actually the difference between the age groups is very little.
Other studies ever report that almost a quarter of Gen Z practices meditation. If we’re looking at gender, twice as many women meditate than men.
Generally, the people who practice meditation are spread over a large part of the population. There’s not really one type of person or characteristic that jumps out.
🧘♂️ Why meditation?
Meditation can improve your memory and make you feel happier. Moreover, it reduces anxiety and stress. It’s a great way to boost your energy and level up your general wellness.
Research about meditation shows
a 12% decrease in depression relapses
a delay in Alzheimer's by 43% (by increasing telomerase enzymes)
improves the ability to carry out daily tasks of back pain sufferers by 30%
reduces the chance by 87% of ending up in the hospital with a coronary heart disease
reduces unhealthy food cravings by 40%
Increases productivity by up to 120%
It also mentions slowing the ageing process, lowering blood pressure, aiding in all kinds of chronic pain, etc.
It clearly is a great way to take care of your physical well-being and mental state
📈 How is it evolving?
What’s more interesting is the trend. If we look at the US for example, we see that the number of adults practising meditation has tripled in the last 10 years. Three out of twenty adults have tried meditation at least once.
It’s nice to see also that almost 1 out of 10 children practices meditation regularly. In San Fransico, even one school introduced a meditation program and measured 45% fewer suspensions afterwards.
Apps have definitely a big impact on the application of meditation. Between 2015 and 2020 over 2500 meditation apps have been launched. At the moment the biggest one is Calm, followed by Headspace. The top 5 include some smaller ones such as Meditopia, Insight Timer and Daily Yoga.
In the US meditation apps are really booming business. About half of the employers offer meditations packages to their employees as part of their company benefits.
I tried to look for statistics on how many three-hugging-hippies and greenies as a comparison, but there seems to be no database on those keywords…
🧑 Personal experiences
I personally use Headspace. A few years ago I did their free trial of 14 days and got hooked ever since. I liked it because the way they teach you meditation in the app has nothing to do with flower power or your chakras. Instead, it’s all about listening to your own body and trying to find peace with all the thoughts in your head. The useful thing is also that you can adapt the length of the exercises. You have short exercises for less than a minute and the courses have sessions from 5, 10 or 15 minutes depending on which stage you are in. It would be a lie if I would tell you I use it every day, but I definitely never regret when meditating. I use it when I need it: when I feel overwhelmed, need some clarity or when I feel I’m at the start of a busy period.
If you want to try it out, you can do their trial. While searching for it I figured out that as a member I can hand out a 30-Day Guest Pass. So, you get a 30-day trial instead of 14 (I don’t get anything in return😉). I heard ‘Calm’ is a great alternative, but I have never used it myself.
😍My Favorite Things of last week
🎙 Podcast: deep dive with Ali Abdaal and Mo Gawdat (former Chief Business Officer of Google X and founder of the happiness movement). His happiness equation is
happiness = events - expectations
That means
if your target is happiness: you need low expectations for everything (f.e. if you don’t expect to eat today, you are happy with a bowl of rice)
if your target is success and impact on life: you need ambition, a crazy target
🎭 Improv: as the final of our long-form improv course, we performed 2 x 45min. of improv last Tuesday. It was the best experience I had with improv so far. In the past I was able to do certain elements separately well: a good story arch, a good character, using voice, … But I always struggled with combining them all. This week the whole performance went in a great flow state and everything connected perfectly. I will definitely do a longer post about improv in the future!
🗨 Quote of the week
“Those who matter don’t mind. Those who mind don’t matter.”
Be who you are and say what you feel By Bernard M. Baruch
✏Visual of the week
➡ Want to get automatic updates on this (somewhat) weekly newsletter?
One last thing…
If you don’t like it or no longer find it interesting: unsubscribe (no hard feelings). If you feel like you want to ask or add something: go ahead. Any kind of feedback is welcome: worshippers, grammar nazis, and everything in between!
Data sources: https://www.thegoodbody.com/meditation-statistics/ ; https://financesonline.com/meditation-statistics/; https://appinventiv.com/blog/latest-meditation-app-statistics/